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Mac at a Quarter Century

Well, it's been 25 years since the Mac was introduced. (To clarify, today is the anniversary of the iconic Super Bowl commercial that introduced the product; two days later - Jan. 24 - the product became available.)

(Applause)

A little background:

• My first interaction with a computer was in high school; we were writing in IITRAN (a variant of FORTRAN) via dumb terminals with code stored on punched paper ribbons. Honest.


• At Cornell University, I programmed (on dumb terminal) in PL/C (variant of the "language of the Ivy League") on punch cards that ran against a monster mainframe (IBM 360, I think) offsite. Time sharing and so on.


• For reasons that escape me, my brother - at the time a CS major - bought my folks a Commadore 64. They didn't use; I did. Taught myself Basic.


• Worked at a company that used PS/1s - boot off a disk (no hard drive), save to floppy.


• Same company switched to Macs; when I first worked with same, I thought "This is the future." I don't think I was wrong.

To me, Macs - much like the iPhone/iPod/iTunes - have changed everything. Apple has that effect.

Kudos to everyone responsible for this shift, especially Steve Jobs. Like Bill Gates, love him or hate him - he gets shit done.

And that's powerful.